So Close

Over the course of three twelve hour days and then some my Dad took the my bathroom floor from demolished to finished.

My job was painting and bringing a constant supply of clean buckets of water during the grouting process. Unfortunately the grout needed 24 hours to cure, so the baseboards cant go up until tomorrow.  Almost there... 

This Floor 's About to Go

My Dad can't play golf this week (he normally plays almost everyday) so he offered to tile the floor in my master bathroom!  My job was the demolition...

Off to Madison

Cathy and John's wedding is this weekend so I am skipping out of work early today for the road-trip to Madison.

There have been no further developments in the basement, I am on strike until my favorite season  is over.

Summer Potatoes

Michigan red and gold potatoes with garlic scape 'pesto'

Summer Weekends

Looking forward to another beautiful Summer weekend! Hopefully the skies will be as pretty as they were last weekend while we were waiting for the fireworks to start.

Knee High by the Fourth of July

This week I had a business trip to Indiana (far less exciting than Japan!) As we drove through the endless fields of corn I was trying to explain the saying Knee High by the Fourth of July, but practically all the corn was already as tall as me.

Rainy Sunday

I am packing up to fly out tomorrow, but I wanted to share some more photos from last weekend.  Tomoki-san, who I first worked with more than seven years ago when I joined the company, offered to entertain me on Sunday.  Knowing that I have already been to a lot of places in the area, he suggested the Aichi Ceramic Meseum where you can look at the artifacts and then make some pottery on a manually turned wheel. I was really impressed with this piece that is a few thousand years old.

After the museum we had a mochi snack at a tiny tiny place near his childhood home

and then moved on this his favorite 'expensive bar' in Toyota city.

The whole place only had 11 seats, the bartender/owner apologized for being "a perfectionist who can only make one drink at a time," and the selection of liquor was like none I have ever seen - every surface was filled with bottles